Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies

“Post-Anarchism today”
2010.1

Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered:

Radical Politics and the Problem of
Self-Domination
Saul Newman ∗

Abstract
In this paper I investigate the problem of voluntary servitude — first
elaborated by Etienne de la Boëtie — and explore its implications for
radical political theory today. The desire for one’s own domination
has proved a major hindrance to projects of human liberation such
as revolutionary Marxism and anarchism, necessitating new under-
standings of subjectivity and revolutionary desire. Central here, as I
show, are micro-political and ethical projects of interrogating one’s
own subjective attachment to power and authority — projects elabo-
rated, in different ways, by thinkers as diverse as Max Stirner, Gustav
Landauer and Michel Foucault. I argue that the question of voluntary
servitude must be taken more seriously by political theory, and that
an engagement with this problem brings to the surface a counter-
sovereign tradition in politics in which the central concern is not
the legitimacy of political power, but rather the possibilities for new
practices of freedom.

Introduction

In this paper I will explore the genealogy of a certain counter-

sovereign political discourse, one that starts with the question ‘why
∗ Saul Newman is a Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.
His research is in the area of radical political and social theory, particularly that
which is informed by perspectives such as post-structuralism, discourse analysis and
psychoanalytical theory. He has written such books as From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-
Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lexington, 2001), Power and Politics
in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Routledge, 2005) and Un-
stable Universalities: Postmodernity and Radical Politics (Manchester University Press,
2007). His newest book, from Edinburgh University Press, is entitled The Politics of
Postanarchism (2010).
32 Saul Newman

do we obey?’ This question, initially posed by the philosopher Eti-

enne de la Boëtie in his investigations on tyranny and our voluntary
servitude to it, starts from the opposite position to the problematic
of sovereignty staked out by Bodin and Hobbes. Moreover, it re-
mains a central and unresolved problem in radical political thought
which works necessarily within the ethical horizon of emancipation
from political power. I suggest that encountering the problem of
voluntary servitude necessitates an exploration of new forms of sub-
jectivity, ethics and political practices through which our subjective
bonds to power are interrogated; and I explore these possibilities
through the revolutionary tradition of anarchism, as well as through
an engagement with psychoanalytic theory. My contention here is
that we cannot counter the problem of voluntary servitude with-
out a critique of idealization and identification, and here I turn to
thinkers like Max Stirner, Gustav Landauer and Michel Foucault, all
of whom, in different ways, develop a micropolitics and ethics of
freedom which aims at undoing the bonds between the subject and
power.

The Powerlessness of Power

The question posed by Etienne De La Boëtie in the middle of the six-

teenth century in Discours de la servitude volontaire, ou Le Contr’Un,
remains with us today and can still be considered a fundamental
political question:

My sole aim on this occasion is to discover how it can happen

that a vast number of individuals, of towns, cities and nations
can allow one man to tyrannize them, a man who has no power
except the power they themselves give him, who could do them
no harm were they not willing to suffer harm, and who could
never wrong them were they not more ready to endure it than
to stand in his way (Etienne De La Boëtie, 1988).

La Boëtie explores the subjective bond which ties us to the power

that dominates us, which enthrals and seduces us, blinds us and mes-
merizes us. The essential lesson here is that the power cannot rely on
coercion, but in reality rests on our power. Our active acquiescence
to power at the same time constitutes this power. For La Boëtie, then,
in order to resist the tyrant, all we need do is turn our backs on him,
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 33

withdraw our active support from him and perceive, through the
illusory spell that power manages to cast over us — an illusion that
we participate in — his weakness and vulnerability. Servitude, then,
is a condition of our own making — it is entirely voluntary; and all
it takes to untie us from this condition is the desire to no longer be
subjugated, the will to be free.
This problem of voluntary servitude is the exact opposite of that
raised by Hobbes a century later. Whereas for La Boëtie, it is un-
natural for us to be subjected to absolute power, for Hobbes it is
unnatural for us to live in any other condition; the anarchy of the
state of nature, for Hobbes, is precisely an unnatural and unbearable
situation. La Boëtie’s problematic of self-domination thus inverts a
whole tradition of political theory based on legitimizing the sover-
eign — a tradition that is still very much with us today. La Boëtie
starts from the opposite position, which is that of the primacy of
liberty, self-determination and the natural bonds of family and com-
panionship, as opposed to the unnatural, artificial bonds of political
domination. Liberty is something which must be protected not so
much against those who wish to impose their will on us, but against
our own temptation to relinquish our liberty, to be dazzled by author-
ity, to barter away our liberty in return for wealth, positions, favours,
and so on. What must be explained, then, is the pathological bond
to power which displaces the natural desire for liberty and the free
bonds that exist between people.
Boëtie’s explanations for voluntary servitude are not entirely ade-
quate or convincing, however: he attributes it to a kind of denaturing,
whereby free men become effeminate and cowardly, thus allowing
another to dominate them. Nevertheless, he raises, I think, one of
the fundamental questions for politics — and especially for radical
politics — namely, why do people at some level desire their own
domination? This question inaugurates a counter-sovereign political
theory, a libertarian line of investigation which is taken up by a num-
ber of thinkers. Wilhelm Reich, for instance, in his Freudo-Marxist
analysis of the mass psychology of fascism, pointed to a desire for
domination and authority which could not be adequately explained
through the Marxist category of ideological false consciousness (Re-
ich, 1980). Pierre Clastres, the anthropologist of liberty, saw the
value of La Boëtie in showing us the possibility that domination is
not inevitable; that voluntary servitude resulted from a misfortune
of history (or pre-history), a certain fall from grace, a lapse from
the condition of primitive freedom and statelessness into a society
 34 Saul Newman

divided between dominators and the dominated. Here, man occupies

the condition of the unnameable (neither man nor animal): so alien-
ated is he from his natural freedom, that he freely chooses, desires,
servitude — a desire which was entirely unknown in primitive soci-
eties (Clastres, 1994: 93–104). Following on from Clastres’ account,
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explored the emergence of the
state, and the way in which it relies not so much, or not entirely, on
violent domination and capture, but rather on the self-domination
of the subject at the level of his or her desire — a repression which is
itself desired. The state acts to channel the subject’s desire through
authoritarian and hierarchical structures of thought and modes of
individualization. 1
Moreover, the Situationist Raoul Vanegeim showed, in an analysis
that bears many a striking likeness to La Boëtie’s, that our obedience
is bought and sustained by minor compensations, a little bit of power
as a psychological pay-off for the humiliation of our own domination:

Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated
for their submission by a shred of power: all subjection entails
the right to a measure of power, and there is no such thing as
power that does not embody a degree of submissions. That is
why some agree so readily to be governed (Vanegeim, 1994:
132).

Another Politics. . .?

The problem of self-domination shows us that the connection

between politics and subjectification must be more thoroughly inves-
tigated. To create new forms of politics — which is the fundamental
theoretical task today — requires new forms of subjectivity, new
modes of subjectivisation. Moreover, to counter voluntary servitude
will involve new political strategies, indeed a different understand-
ing of politics itself. Quite rightly, La Boëtie recognizes the potential
for domination in any democracy: the democratic leader, elected by

1 Deleuze and Guattari point to the mysterious way that we are tied to State power,
something which the term ‘voluntary servitude’ both illuminates and obscures: “The
State is assuredly not the locus of liberty, nor the agent of forced servitude or capture.
Should we then speak of ‘voluntary servitude’?” See Deleuze & Guattari (2005: 460).
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 35

the people, becomes intoxicated with his own power and teeters in-
creasingly towards tyranny. Indeed, we can see modern democracy
itself as an instance of voluntary servitude on a mass scale. It is not
so much that we participate in an illusion whereby we are deceived
by elites into thinking we have a genuine say in decision-making. It
is rather that democracy itself has encouraged a mass contentment
with powerlessness and a general love of submission.
As an alternative, La Boëtie asserts the idea of a free republic.
However, I would suggest that the inverse of voluntary servitude
is not a free republic, but another form of politics entirely. Free
republics have a domination of their own, not only in their laws, but
in the rule of the rich and propertied classes over the poor. Rather,
when we consider alternative forms of politics, when we think about
ways of enacting and maximizing the possibilities of non-domination,
I think we ought to consider the politics of anarchism — which is
a politics of anti-politics, a politics which seeks the abolition of the
structures of political power and authority enshrined in the state.
Anarchism, this most heretical of radical political philosophies,
has led for a long time a marginalized existence. This is due in part
to its heterodox nature, to the way it cannot be encompassed within
a single system of ideas or body of thought, but rather refers to a
diverse ensemble of ideas, philosophical approaches, revolutionary
practices and historical movements and identities. However, what
makes a reconsideration of anarchist thought essential here is that
out of all the radical traditions, it is the one that is most sensitive to
the dangers of political power, to the potential for authoritarianism
and domination contained within any political arrangement or in-
stitution. In this sense, it is particularly wary of the bonds through
which people are tied to power. That is why, unlike the Marxist-
Leninists, anarchists insisted that the state must be abolished in the
first stages of the revolution: if, on the other hand, state power was
seized by a vanguard and used — under the ‘dictatorship of the pro-
letariat’ — to revolutionize society, it will, rather than eventually
‘withering away’, expand in size and power, engendering new class
contradictions and antagonisms. To imagine, in other words, that
the state was a kind of neutral mechanism that could be used as a
tool of liberation if the right class controlled it, was, according to
the classical anarchists of the nineteenth century, engaged as they
were in major debates with Marx, a pure fantasy that ignored the in-
extricable logic of state domination and the temptations and lures of
political power. That was why the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin
36 Saul Newman

insisted that the state must be examined as a specific structure of

power which could not be reduced to the interests of a particular
class. It was — in its very essence — dominating: “And there are
those who, like us, see in the State, not only its actual form and in all
forms of domination that it might assume, but in its very essence, an
obstacle to the social revolution” (Kropotkin, 1943). The power of the
state, moreover, perpetuates itself through the subjective bond that
it forms with those who attempt to control it, through the corrupting
influence it has on them. In the words of another anarchist, Mikhail
Bakunin, “We of course are all sincere socialists and revolutionists
and still, were we to be endowed with power [. . .] we would not be
where we are now” (Bakunin, 1953: 249).
This uncompromising critique of political power, and the convic-
tion that freedom cannot be conceived within the framework of the
state, is what distinguishes anarchism from other political philoso-
phies. It contrasts with liberalism, which is in reality a politics of
security, where the state becomes necessary to protect individual
liberty from the liberty of others: indeed, the current securitization
of the state through the permanent state of exception reveals the true
face of liberalism. It differs also in this respect from socialism, which
sees the state as essential for making society more equal, and whose
terminal decline can be witnessed in the sad fate of social democratic
parties today with their authoritarian centralism, their law and order
fetishes and their utter complicity with global neoliberalism. Further-
more, anarchism is to be distinguished from revolutionary Leninism,
which now represents a completely defunct model of radical politics.
What defines anarchism, then, is the refusal of state power, even
of the revolutionary strategy of seizing state power. Instead, the
focus of anarchism is on self-emancipation and autonomy, some-
thing which cannot be achieved through parliamentary democratic
channels or through revolutionary vanguards, but rather through
the development of alternative practices and relationships based on
free association, equal liberty and voluntary cooperation.
It is because of its alterity or exteriority to other state-centred
modes of politics that anarchism has been largely overshadowed
within the radical political tradition. Yet, I would argue that cur-
rently we are in a kind of anarchist moment politically. What I mean
is that with the eclipse of the socialist state project and revolution-
ary Leninism, and with the devolving of liberal democracy into a
narrow politics of security, that radical politics today tends to situate
itself increasingly outside the state. Contemporary radical activism
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 37

seems to reflect certain anarchist orientations in its emphasis on de-

centralized networks and direct action, rather than party leadership
and political representation. There is a kind of disengagement from
state power, a desire to think and act beyond its structures, in the
direction of greater autonomy. These tendencies are becoming more
pronounced with the current economic crisis, something which is
pointing to the very limits of capitalism itself, and certainly to the
end of the neoliberal economic model. The answer to the failings of
neoliberalism is not more state intervention. It is ludicrous to talk
about the return of the regulatory state: the state in fact never went
away under neoliberalism, and the whole ideology of economic ‘lib-
ertarianism’ concealed a much more intensive deployment of state
power in the domain of security, and in the regulation, disciplining
and surveillance of social life. It is clear, moreover, that the state will
not help us in this current situation; there is no point looking to it
for protection. Indeed, what is emerging is a kind of disengagement
from the state; the coming insurrections will challenge the hege-
mony of the state, which we see increasingly governing through the
logic of exception.
Moreover, the relevance of anarchism is also reflected at a theo-
retical level. Many of themes and preoccupations of contemporary
continental thinkers for instance — the idea of non-state, non-party
and post-class forms of politics, the coming of the multitudes and
so on — seem to invoke an anarchist politics. Indeed, this is particu-
larly evident in the search for a new political subject: the multitudes
of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the people for Ernesto La-
clau, the excluded part-of-no-part for Jacques Rancière, the figure
of the militant for Alain Badiou; all this reflects an attempt to think
about new modes of subjectification which are perhaps broader and
less constraining than the category of the proletariat as politically
constituted through the Marxist-Leninist vanguard. A similar ap-
proach to political subjectivity was proposed by the anarchists in
the nineteenth century, who claimed that the Marxist notion of the
revolutionary class was exclusivist, and who sought to include the
peasantry and lumpenroletariat as revolutionary identities. 2 In my
view, anarchism is the ‘missing link’ in contemporary continental
political thought — a spectral presence which is never really acknowl-
edged. 3

2 See Bakunin’s notion of the revolutionary mass as opposed to the Marxist category
of class (Bakunin, 1984: 47).
 38 Saul Newman

The Anarchist Subject

Anarchism is a politics and ethics in which power is continually

interrogated in the name of human freedom, and in which human
existence is posited in the absence of authority. However, this raises
the question of whether there is an anarchist subject as such. Here I
would like to reconsider anarchism through the problem of voluntary
servitude. While the classical anarchists were not unaware of the
desires for power that lay at the heart of the human subject — which
is why they were so keen to abolish the structures of power which
would incite these desires — the problem of self-domination, the
desire for one’s own domination, remains insufficiently theorized in
anarchism. 4 For the anarchists of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies — such as William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail
Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin — conditioned as they were by the ra-
tionalist discourses of Enlightenment humanism, the human subject
naturally desired freedom; thus the revolution against state power
was part of the rational narrative of human emancipation. The ex-
ternal and artificial constraints of state power would be thrown off,
so that man’s essential rational and moral properties could be ex-
pressed and society could be in harmony with itself. There is a kind
of Manichean opposition that is presupposed in classical anarchist
thought, between human society which is governed by natural laws,
and political power and man-made law, embodied in the state, which
is artificial, irrational and a constraint on the free development of
social forces. There is, furthermore, an innate sociability in man — a
natural tendency, as Kropotkin saw it, towards mutual aid and coop-
eration — which was distorted by the state, but which, if allowed to

3 For a discussion of the relevance of classical anarchism and contemporary radical

political philosophy, see my paper (2007) ‘Anarchism, Poststructuralism and the
Future of Radical Politics Today’, Substance (113)36/2.
4 This acknowledgement of the desire for power at the heart of human subjectivity does
not endorse the Hobbesian position affirming the need for a strong sovereign. On the
contrary, it makes the goal of fragmenting and abolishing centralized structures of
power and authority all the more necessary. Surely if, in other words, human nature
is prone to the temptations of power and the desire for domination, the last thing we
should do is trust a sovereign with absolute power over us. A similar point is made by
Paolo Virno (see the essay ‘Multitude and Evil’), who argues that if we are to accept
the ‘realist’ claim that we have as humans a capacity for ‘evil’, then, rather than this
justifying centralized state authority, we should be even more cautious about the
concentration of power and violence in the hands of the state (cf., Virno, 2008).
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 39

flourish, would produce a social harmony in which the state would

become unnecessary (cf., Kropotkin, 2007).
While the idea of a society without a state, without sovereignty
and law is desirable, and indeed the ultimate horizon of radical poli-
tics, and while there can be no doubt that political and legal authority
is an oppressive encumbrance on social life and human existence
generally, what tends to be obscured in this ontological separation
between the subject and power is the problem of voluntary servi-
tude — which points to the more troubling complicity between the
subject and the power that dominates him. To take this into account,
to explain the desire for self-domination and to develop strategies
— ethical and political strategies — to counter it, would be to pro-
pose an anarchist theory of subjectivity, or at least a more developed
one than can be found in classical anarchist thought. It would also
imply a move beyond some of the essentialist and rationalist cate-
gories of classical anarchism, a move that elsewhere I have referred
to as postanarchism (Newman, 2010). This is not to suggest that
the classical anarchists were necessarily naïve about human nature
or politics; rather that its humanism and rationalism resulted in a
kind of blind-spot around the question of desire, whose dark, convo-
luted, self-destructive and irrational nature would be revealed later
by psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and Passionate Attachments

So it is important to explore the subjective bond to power at the

level of the psyche. 5 A psychological dependency on power, which
was explored by Freudo-Marxists such as Marcuse and Reich 6, meant
that the possibilities of emancipatory politics are at times compro-
mised by hidden authoritarian desires; that there was always a risk

5 This is similar to what Jason Glynos refers to as the problem of self-transgression (see
Glyno, 2008) The argument here is that conceptualization and practice of freedom is
often complicated by various forms of self-transgression, where the subject engages in
activities which limit his or her freedom — which prevent him or her from achieving
one’s object of desire, or achieving a certain ideal that one might have of oneself —
because of the unconscious enjoyment (jouissance) derived from this transgression.
Thus the limitation to the subject’s freedom is not longer external (as in the paradigm
of negative freedom) but internal. This might be another way of thinking about the
problem of voluntary servitude through the lens of psychoanalysis.
6 See also Theodore Adorno’s study [et al] The Authoritarian Personality (1964).
 40 Saul Newman

of authoritarian and hierarchical practices and institutions emerging

in post-revolutionary societies. The central place of the subject —
in politics, philosophy — is not abandoned here but complicated.
Radical political projects, for instance, have to contend with the
ambiguities of human desire, with irrational social behaviour, with
violent and aggressive drives, and even with unconscious desires for
authority and domination.
This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis is necessarily politically
or socially conservative. On the contrary, I would maintain that
central to psychoanalysis is a libertarian ethos by which the subject
seeks to gain a greater autonomy, and where the subject is encour-
aged, through the rules of ‘free association’, to speak the truth of the
unconscious. 7 To insist on the ‘dark side’ of the human psyche — its
dependence on power, its identification with authoritarian figures,
its aggressive impulses — can serve as a warning to any revolution-
ary project which seeks to transcend political authority. This was
really the same question that was posed by Jacques Lacan in response
to the radicalism of May ’68: “the revolutionary aspiration has only
a single possible outcome — of ending up as the master’s discourse.
This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolution-
aries is a master. You will get one” (Lacan, 2007: 207). What Lacan
is hinting at with this rather ominous prognostication — one that
could be superficially, although, in my view, incorrectly, interpreted
as politically conservative — is the hidden link, even dependency,
between the revolutionary subject and authority; and the way that
movements of resistance and even revolution may actually sustain
the symbolic efficiency of the state, reaffirming or reinventing the
position of authority.
Psychoanalysis by no means discounts the possibility of human
emancipation, sociability and voluntary cooperation: indeed, it
points to conflicting tendencies in the subject between aggressive
desires for power and domination, and the desire for freedom and
harmonious co-existence. As Judith Butler contends, moreover, the
psyche — as a dimension of the subject that is not reducible to dis-
course and power, and which exceeds it — is something that can
explain not only our passionate attachments to power and (referring

7 According to Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of groups implies

“something like a “revolt or an uprising against the hypnotist’s unjustifiable power”
(1988: 148).
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 41

to Foucault) to the modes of subjectification and regulatory behav-

iours that power imposes on us, but also our resistance to them
(Butler, 1997: 86).

Ego Identification

One of the insights of psychoanalysis, something that was re-

vealed, for instance, in Freud’s study of the psychodynamics of
groups, was the role of identification in constituting hierarchical
and authoritarian relationships. In the relationship between the
member of the group and the figure of the Leader, there is a process
of identification, akin to love, in which the individual both ideal-
izes and identifies with the Leader as an ‘ideal type’, to the point
where this object of devotion comes to supplant the individual’s ego
ideal (Freud, 1955). It is this idealization that constitutes the sub-
jective bond not only between the individual and the Leader of the
group, but also with other members of the group. Idealization thus
becomes a way of understanding voluntary submission to the will
of authoritarian leaders.
However, we also need to understand the place of idealization in
politics in a broader sense, and it is here that, I would argue, the
thinking of the Young Hegelian philosopher, Max Stirner, becomes
important. Stirner’s critique of Ludwig Feuerbach’s humanism al-
lows us to engage with this problem of self-domination. Stirner
shows that the Feuerbachian project of replacing God with Man — of
reversing the subject and predicate so that the human becomes the
measure of the divine rather than the divine the human (Feuerbach,
1957) — has only reaffirmed religious authority and hierarchy rather
than displacing it. Feuerbach’s ‘humanist insurrection’ has thus only
succeeded in creating a new religion — Humanism — which Stirner
connects with a certain self-enslavement. The individual ego is now
split between itself and an idealized form of itself now enshrined in
the idea of human essence — an ideal which is at the same time out-
side the individual, becoming an abstract moral and rational spectre
by which he measures himself and to which he subordinates himself.
As Stirner declares: “Man, your head is haunted [. . .] You imagine
great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has
an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself
to be called, an ideal that beckons to you” (Stirner, 1995: 43).
42 Saul Newman

For Stirner, the subordination of the self to these abstract ideals

(‘fixed ideas’) has political implications. Humanism and rationalism
become in his analysis the discursive thresholds through which the
desire of the individual is bound to the state. This occurs through
identification with state-defined roles of citizenship, for instance.
Moreover, for Stirner, in a line of thought that closely parallels La
Boëtie’s, the state itself is an ideological abstraction which only
exists because we allow it to exist, because we abdicate our own
power over ourselves to what he called the ‘ruling principle’. In
other words, it is the idea of the state, of sovereignty, that dominates
us. The state’s power is in reality based on our power, and it is only
because the individual has not recognized this power, because he
humbles himself before an external political authority, that the state
continues to exist. As Stirner correctly surmised, the state cannot
function only through repression and coercion; rather, the state
relies on us allowing it to dominate us. Stirner wants to show that
ideological apparatuses are not only concerned with economic or
political questions — they are also rooted in psychological needs. The
dominance of the state, Stirner suggests, depends on our willingness
to let it dominate us:

What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What

your orders, if nobody lets himself be ordered? [. . .] The state
is not thinkable without lordship [Herrschaft] and servitude
[Knechtschaft] (subjection); [. . .] He who, to hold his own, must
count on the absence of the will in others is a thing made by
these others, as the master is a thing made by the servant. If
submissiveness ceased it would be all over with lordship (Stirner,
1995: 174–5).

Stirner was ruthlessly and relentlessly criticized by Marx and

Engels as ‘Saint Max’ in The German Ideology: they accused him of the
worst kind of idealism, of ignoring the economic and class relations
that form the material basis of the state, and thus allowing the state
to be simply wished out of existence. However, what is missed in
this critique is the value of Stirner’s analysis in highlighting the
subjective bond of voluntary servitude that sustains state power. It
is not that he is saying that the state does not exist in a material
sense, but that its existence is sustained and supplemented through
a psychic attachment and dependency on its power, as well as the
acknowledgement and idealization of its authority. Any critique of
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 43

the state which ignores this dimension of subjective idealization is

bound to perpetuate its power. The state must first be overcome as
an idea before it can be overcome in reality; or, more precisely, these
are two sides of the same process.
The importance of Stirner’s analysis — which broadly fits into the
anarchist tradition, although breaks with its humanist essentialism
in important ways 8 — lies in exploring this voluntary self-subjection
that forms the other side of politics, and which radical politics must
find strategies to counter. For Stirner, the individual can only free
him or herself from voluntary servitude if he abandons all essential
identities and sees himself as a radically self-creating void:

I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself;

but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like
‘Man struggling for his perfection’, but only serves me to enjoy
it and consume it [. . .] I do not presuppose myself, because I am
every moment just positing or creating myself (Stirner, 1995:
150).

While Stirner’s approach is focused on the idea of the individ-

ual’s self-liberation — from essences, fixed identities — he does raise
the possibility of collective politics with his notion of the ‘union of
egoists’, although in my view this is insufficiently developed. The
breaking of the bonds of voluntary servitude cannot be a purely in-
dividual enterprise. Indeed, as La Boëtie suggests, it always implies
a collective politics, a collective rejection of tyrannical power by the
people. I am not suggesting that Stirner provides us with a complete
or viable theory of political and ethical action. However, the impor-
tance of Stirner’s thought lies in the invention of a micropolitics, an
emphasis on the myriad ways we are bound to power at the level of
our subjectivity, and the ways we can free ourselves from this. It is
here that we should pay close attention to his distinction between
the Revolution and the insurrection:

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as syn-

onymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions,
of the established condition or status, the state or society, and
is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for

8 See my reading of Stirner as a poststructuralist anarchist in From Bakunin to Lacan

(2001).
44 Saul Newman

its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances,

yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with them-
selves, is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting
up without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The
Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us
no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves,
and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’. It is not a fight
against the established, since, if it prospers, the established
collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the
established (Italics are Stirner’s; Stirner, 1995: 279–80).

We can take from this that radical politics must not only be aimed
at overturning established institutions like the state, but also at at-
tacking the much more problematic relation through which the sub-
ject is enthralled to and dependent upon power. The insurrection
is therefore not only against external oppression, but, more funda-
mentally, against the self’s internalized repression. It thus involves
a transformation of the subject, a micro-politics and ethics which is
aimed at increasing one’s autonomy from power.
Here we can also draw upon the spiritual anarchism of Gustav
Landauer, who argued that there can be no political revolution — and
no possibility of socialism — without at the same time a transforma-
tion in the subjectivity of people, a certain renewal of the spirit and
the will to develop new relationships with others. Existing relation-
ships between people only reproduce and reaffirm state authority
— indeed the state itself is a certain relationship, a certain mode of
behaviour and interaction, a certain imprint on our subjectivity and
consciousness (and I would argue on our unconscious) and therefore
it can only be transcended through a spiritual transformation of re-
lationships. As Landauer says, “we destroy it by contracting other
relationships, by behaving differently” (in Martin Buber, 1996: 47).

A Micro-Politics of Liberty

Therefore, overcoming the problem of voluntary servitude, which

has proved such a hindrance to radical political projects in the past,
implies this sort of ethical questioning of the self, an interrogation
of one’s subjective involvement and complicity with power. It relies
on the invention of micropolitical strategies that are aimed at a dis-
engagement from state power; a certain politics of dis-identification
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 45

in which one breaks free from established social identities and roles
and develops new practices, ways of life and forms of politics that
are no longer conditioned by state sovereignty. This would mean
thinking about what freedom means beyond the ideology of security
(rather than simply seeing freedom as conditioned by or necessarily
constrained by security). We also need to think what democracy
means beyond the state, what politics means beyond the party, eco-
nomic organization beyond capitalism, globalization beyond borders,
and life beyond biopolitics.
Central here has to be, for instance, a critical interrogation of the
desire for security. Security, in our contemporary society, has be-
come a kind of metaphysics, a fundamentalism, where not only is it
the impetus behind an unprecedented expansion and intensification
of state power, but also becomes a kind of condition for life: life must
be secure against threats — whether they are threats to our safety,
financial security, etc — but this means that the very existential possi-
bility of not only human freedom, but politics itself, is being negated.
Can the law and liberal institutional frameworks protect us from se-
curity; can it counter the relentless drive towards the securitization
of life? We must remember that, as Giorgio Agamben and others
have shown, biopolitics, sovereign violence and securitization are
only the other side of the law, and that it is simply a liberal illusion
to imagine that law can limit power in this way. No, we must invent
a new relationship to law and institutions, no longer as subjects who
are obedient, nor as subjects who simply transgress (which is only
the other side to obedience — in other words, transgression, as we
understand from Lacan, continues to affirm the law 9). Rather, we
must transcend this binary of obedience/transgression. Anarchism
is more than a transgression, but a learning to live beyond the law
and the state through the invention of new spaces and practices for
freedom and autonomy which will be, by their nature, somewhat
fragile and experimental.
To take such risks requires discipline, but this can be a kind of
ethical discipline that we impose on ourselves. We need to be dis-
ciplined to become undisciplined. Obedience to authority seems to
come easily, indeed ‘naturally’, to us, as La Boëtie observed, and
so the revolt against authority requires the disciplined and patient
elaboration of new practices of freedom. This was something that

9 See Lacan’s discussion of the dialectic of law and transgression in ‘Kant avec Sade’
(1962).
46 Saul Newman

Foucault was perhaps getting at with his notion of askesis, ethical

exercises that were part of the care of the self, and which were for
him indistinguishable from the practice of freedom (cf., Foucault,
1988). The aim of such strategies, for Foucault, was to invent modes
of living in which one is ‘governed less’ or governed not at all. In-
deed, the practice of critique itself, according to Foucault, is aimed
not only at questioning power’s claim to legitimacy and truth, but
more importantly, at questioning the various ways in which we are
bound to power and regimes of governmentality through certain
deployments of truth — through power’s insistence that we conform
to certain truths and norms. For Foucault, then: “Critique will be the
art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility” (emphasis added;
Foucault, 1996: 386). Foucault therefore speaks of an interrogation
of the limits of our subjectivity that requires a “patient labour giving
form to our impatience for liberty” (Foucault, 2000: 319). Perhaps,
then, we can counter the problem of voluntary servitude through a
radical discipline of indiscipline.

Conclusion: A Politics of Refusal

Voluntary inservitude — the refusal of power’s domination over

ourselves — should not be confused with a refusal of politics. Rather
it should be seen as the construction of an alternative form of politics,
and as intensification of political action; we might call it a politics
of withdrawal from power, a politics of non-domination. There is
nothing apolitical about such a politics of refusal: the politics of
refusal is not a refusal of politics as such, but rather a refusal of the
established forms and practices of politics enshrined in the state,
and the desire to create new forms of politics outside the state —
the desire, in other words, for a politics of autonomy. Indeed, the
notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’, invoked by Carl Schmitt
to affirm the sovereignty of the state — the prerogative of the state
to define the friend/enemy opposition (Schmitt, 1996) — should be
seen, on my alternative reading, as suggesting a politics of autonomy.
The proper moment of the political is outside the state and seeks to
engender new non-authoritarian relationships and ways of life.
A number of contemporary continental thinkers such as Giorgio
Agamben, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have proposed a
similar notion of refusal or withdrawal as a way of thinking about
radical politics today. Indeed, the recent interest in the figure of
 Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered 47

Bartleby (from Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener) as a paradigm of

resistance to power, points to a certain realization of the limits of
existing models of radical and revolutionary politics, and an acknowl-
edgement, moreover, of the need to overcome voluntary subjection to
power. Bartleby’s impassive gesture of defiance towards authority —
“I would prefer not to” — might be seen as an active withdrawal from
participation in the practices and activities which reaffirm power,
and without which power would collapse. In the words of Hardt and
Negri, “These simple men [Bartleby and Michael K, a character from
a J.M Coetzee novel] and their absolute refusals cannot but appeal
to our hatred of authority. The refusal of work and authority, the
refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics”
(Hardt & Negri, 2000: 204).
In this paper I have placed the problem of voluntary servitude —
diagnosed long ago by La Boëtie — at the centre of radical political
thought. Voluntary servitude, whose contours have been sharp-
ened by psychoanalytic theory, might be understood as a threshold
through which the subject is bound to power at the level of his or her
desire. At the same time, the idea of voluntary servitude also points
to the very fragility and undecidability of domination, and the way
that, through the invention of micro-political and ethical strategies
of de-subjectification — an anarchic politics of voluntary inservitude
— one may loosen and untie this bond and create alternative spaces
of politics beyond the shadow of the sovereign.
48 Saul Newman

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